Whose History curriculum is it anyway?

After months of secrecy – for no clear reason – at the DfE, I got surprising response to my FOI request this month. I had expected to be told that the names of the people whose advice was sought about the re-drafting of the curriculum would be withheld, so it was quite a shock to see them set out before me.

Since the list was published, others have taken a great interest in it, and our enquiries are now greatly supported by the efforts of Marina Robb (@MarinaRobb) who has taken the time to try to find out some brief details about each of the panel members. The work below is all hers (save for the formatting):

1. Scott Baker: Head of History at the Robert Clack School in Dagenham and History rep Academic Steering Group of The Prince’s Teaching Institute(Secondary Education)

10. Dr. David Green (?): Head of Civitas [Politics/Stance: Right of Centre)

11. Elizabeth Hutchinson: Former head of history, Parkstone Grammar School, Poole Contracted by DofE to draw up GCSE History subject content (Secondary Background)

12. Matthew Inniss: Subject Leader for History and an Economics Teacher at Paddington Academy in Westminster. (Secondary Education)

13. Dr Seán Lang: Senior Lecturer in History, specialising in the history of the British Empire, Chair of the Better History Group (Higher Education/History Advocacy) [Politics/Stance: Traditional Knowledge Curriculum]

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2 thoughts on “Whose History curriculum is it anyway?”

I think the labels here demonstrate very clearly just how difficult it is to pigeon hole people, which is of course what people want to do when they see such a list to work out if it is ‘balanced’ or ‘fair’. For example, the description of Jamie Byrom here is really very simplistic – he was one of the early critics of dumbed-down source-based activities (he wrote on this in the 1990s), something that would put him very much in the same court as a Rob Peal, and yet he is also a fellow of the SHP, which Peal would hate.

As someone pretty immersed in the history education community (and knowing well over half of this list quite well either by their work or personally), I would suggest that this is an exceptionally well-balanced panel. I do not mean here so much that it ticks every single possible box imaginable (primary/secondary, ethnicity, gender, political affiliation, etc.), but rather that, if you take the major debates in the field of history education, then representatives from across those spectra are all here represented.

The major debates fall along the lines of things like British history vs non British history, use of sources vs not use of sources, teaching overview or teaching depth, local history vs national history and so on. This panel was well placed to debate all of these issues.

Generally speaking, the final draft curriculum that came out was very well supported across the profession and had widespread support from organisations such as the SHP, HA and RHS. No system is ever going to be perfect, but in terms of (a) the panel selected for the process and (b) the outcome they produced, this really could have been much much worse. Hats off to the DfE as far as I’m concerned.